Mable and the Wood is a shape-shifting adventure with clever combat

Darkness has enshrouded the land, and only the recently revived Mable can save the world. Mable And The Wood is a unique platformer with an amazing sense of momentum.

A metroidvania where you play an encumbered protagonist who can use magical powers to travel in different ways, Triplevision Games’ Mable and the Wood is a game that is hard to talk about without overly discussing movement, because all of the navigation and combat revolves around it.

Mable’s initial other form is that of a fairy who can flutter around within a radius of the blade. When you’re done in fairy form, you return to human form, your blade zooming through the air to meet Mable’s hand, damaging anything in its path. Essentially, your transformation is aligning, then delivering, a powerful ranged attack. Later forms all play with this movement and delivery technique, with the spider form (which was included in the EGX demo) allowing you to attack enemies while travelling a great distance, like a grappling-hook weapon.

While Mable and the Wood is a metroidvania, and that’s a genre that is intrinsically interwoven with combat and bosses, it can be played through passively — with ways to avoid the boss fights and the option to simply avoid all enemies. NPCs will even chastise you for taking a more violent approach to saving the forest — seeing you as a humanoid bulldozer deciding to only save lives through taking others. That’s certainly fine for the cult who have summoned you to push back the darkness, but the citizens of the world are more aware of the world and its cycles — and you can choose how you fit into their expectations.

Mable and the Wood is being developed for PC, Mac and Linux, and is expected to launch on those platforms in Q1 of 2019.